Hello from Vancouver Island

Long time using a camera but mostly just for documentation. Had a period of time when I had access to a darkroom and did a lot of B&W really focusing on creating good photographs. Once that 3 month class was over and it was back to day to day film photography - well a lot of that creative spark went by the wayside as I really got as much out of manipulating images as I did taking them. Most color films were just too flat for my interests. A year or two ago I saw some really well done HDR (not the wild stuff - although some of that is pretty cool too) and the urge to "get back into it" was reborn. Bought a G1 with a 14-45 and 45-200 for work and have been using it till I buy my own DSLR in the next few months. Also bought Artizen HDR (only $46 and very full featured) to process images and have started the learning curve on post-processing. Still have to figure out how to do something with a layer though. Guess that's the next big step. Meanwhile I look forward to participating here.

Oh Gawd... look what you've just done to me tonight... and all this for $49 Cdn too!

Artizen is a...

-RAW Converter with support for more than 15+ RAW file format from more than 230+ digital cameras.
-HDR App with state of the art Auto Alignment algorithm, 4 Tone Mapping Operators (Display, Natural, and Dramatic) with Batch Processing capabilities.
-Panoramic Converter
-Image Editor with 100+ functions such as Levels, Curves, Color Balance, White Balance, Exposure, Blur and much much more..

HDR is High Dynamic Range images. HDR you say?...

"HDR is not a concept that is just a fad or some crazy idea that only the highest end professionals ever have to think about, but rather something that will change everything from how you take pictures with your family camera to the way that the Hubble Telescope takes pictures of our sun.

"Taking a simple observation of how light looks in the world around us, one will notice that there are areas that are too bright for the eye to look at like the sun, and areas that are too dark to see. This is referred to as RANGE of light (also referred to as luminance) which is visible to the human eye. The human eye can see a range of approx. 10,000:1 but this range can adapt over a 1,000,000:1 range (walking outside, eyes slowly adjust so one can see better at those luminance levels). This is where we are presented with a problem. Currently our monitors, cameras and TV's have very limited range, approx. 100:1, which is 1/100 of what we can see. As a result of this limitation, file formats were created to work with limited mediums such as Windows Bitmap. Original JPEG and TIFF images could only encode a limited brightness range of 0-255 (i.e. the brightest point of only 255 times as bright as the darkest point). After 30 years the move has finally been made, for both JPEG and TIFF file formats to now support higher and broader color depths.

"You may think to yourself, is why would I need anything more if you can't see it on a screen or capture it with your camera. This is where we need to explain. In the world of computers a BYTE is limited to values between 0 - 255, so let's say you store all your image information as BYTES and you brighten your image by 20 value points, any value that was greater than 235 now becomes 255 and all the detail that was stored between 235 - 255 is now lost. So if the same image was darkened by 20 points the image would make any value that was 255 equal to 235 (rather than a range of values between 235 and 255). This always leaves your image with a contrast reduction effect.

"To work around this, the HDR (High Dynamic Range) process was developed. High dynamic range image files are special formats that accurately encode the extreme luminance of very dark and very light areas of the scene without any visible data loss. HDR images address two issues, the first is that it can now store values ranging from 1x10exp(+/-37) and the second is that the range is so large that programmers never have to clamp the values of their image to a fixed max value such as 255. So by using the example above if the value was increased and then decreased by 20 points the original values would be restored leaving the image unchanged. This sort of editing is referred to as "Non-Destructive", since any change can be reversed without data loss.

"HDR images are normally created using digital cameras that can record different exposure levels (some cameras even come with Auto-Bracketing), so that they can be combined later to make a very detailed images storing data for both very dark and bright areas. This leaves the user with all the control to decide the look of the final result."

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